Austrialia Science

Science in education

• The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has a wide range of science education programs, which provide an excellent resource for students in both primary and secondary school.

1. Quantum;
2. Richard Morecroft Goes Wild;
3. Creature Features ; and
4. Catalyst.

• National Science Week is Australia's major annual science extravaganza. With so much happening - broadcasts and events generally continue for about a month around the official dates. Science Week provides a good opportunity to consider Australian scientists' contributions to the world of knowledge and point to some Internet resources of interest. Science Week, and the activities that coincide with it, provides opportunities to draw attention to Australian science successes, to encourage interest in science pursuits and to get younger people fascinated by the world in which we live. Which is what scientific exploration is all about - asking questions about our world and ourselves. One of the events occurring in National Science Week is Science in the City a celebration of the contributions of science to society. As part of National Science Week, the program features over 300 activities in the heart of the City of Sydney.

• An unexpected funding boost has left many Australian scientists in a positive frame of mind after federal treasurer Wayne Swan delivered a budget last week that raised research and education expenditure by almost 25% over the previous year's spending.The budget, presented to parliament on 12 May, features a raft of research-related spending measures, including funding reform for universities and an overhaul of tax arrangements for private-sector research and development (R&D) that had been recommended by recent government reviews of innovation and higher education. The budget numbers still need to be passed by the Senate. Altogether, the proposed funding measures are worth Aus$5.7 billion (US$4.3 billion) over four years, including Aus$3.1 billion on R&D, with the remainder on education. "In the lead-up to the budget, the government talked down expectations," says John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland in St Lucia. "But the budget outcome is far better than might have been feared in the light of pre-budget softening up." The 25% increase from 2008–09 to 2009–10 would represent the highest annual rise since records of science funding began in the 1970s, says Ken Baldwin, president of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, the main representative body for Australia's scientists. "I think this puts us back in the running with other countries that have invested significantly in science," he told Nature. The investment is particularly significant given the current global financial downturn, Baldwin says. "Australia is relatively well placed in an economic sense, and is now relatively well placed in a research and development sense," he says. "It shows that the overall commitment to use research and development as a driver for economic recovery is front and centre of the government's planning."A key measure is a phased commitment to fund the full cost of research in universities. Researchers have long complained about not getting enough funding to cover indirect research costs.

• Alongside this interest in logic, history and philosophy of science has also found a central place in both teaching and research in Australia, with recent studies in philosophy of biology by Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths complementing the focus on physics and problems of space and time of an earlier generation of writers such as Graham Nerlich . The history of philosophy itself has received careful attention in the writings of John Passmore , Stephen Gaukroger , and Stewart Candlish .Work on moral and political philosophy was shaped to an extent by migrant influence, though some of the best-known work in this area was carried out by Australians who chose to live overseas—for example, J. L. Mackie , famous for his defence of the ‘error theory’ of value in his 1977 book on Ethics. Before then, Kurt Baier had defended a robust moral objectivism, D. H. Monro had defended moral subjectivism, and Julius Kovesi had queried the ‘fact-value gap’. Many of the works on ethical and political theory originating from Australia after the Seventies championed forms of utilitarianism and consequentialism (in the hands, for example, of Smart, Pettit, and Robert Goodin ), with C. L. Ten and Robert Young standing apart from this general trend. Engagement with meta-ethical theory continued when in 1994 Michael Smith published The Moral Problem, an attempt at reconciling a form of moral rationalism with a Humean approach to motivation.A different way of approaching philosophical, political, and moral problems, incorporating psychological and sociological perspectives, has inspired a distinctive school of Australian feminist philosophy, in the hands of Moira Gatens , Elizabeth Grosz , and others, whose writing intersects to an extent with a developing interest in, and indeed resurgence of, European philosophy in both Australia and New Zealand. Matching the synthesis of analytic and European styles of philosophizing championed by Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty in the United States, a similar convergence has characterized recent Australian writing by Max Deutscher , Jeff Malpas , Paul Redding , and a few others. Applied ethics has lately received recognition, and large-scale financial support, in keeping with earlier Australian pioneering studies in environmental philosophy by Routley , Passmore , Val Routley (later Plumwood ), Robert Elliot , and others. Debates on social and political justice, poverty, abortion, bioethics, and biomedical ethics have been subject to philosophically informed scrutiny by writers like Michael Tooley , Genevieve Lloyd , Peter Singer , Freya Mathews , Janna Thompson , and Rai Gaita . While some of these arguments have taken on a life of their own, disengaged from technical issues within philosophy itself, the emergence of intellectual debate at home and overseas featuring these and other thinkers is a powerful testimony to the continuing vigour and influence of Australian philosophy.